ACADEMIC WRITING

BOOKS

  • Eye of the world: moving images and the crisis of mediation (In progress)

  • Documentary Degree Zero: Counter-cinema and the aesthetics of realism in India, 1967-the present (In progress)

JOURNAL ISSUE

  • “Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform” (Vol. 29, 1) Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (Read the intro here)

REFEREED JOURNALS

  • “The Weather in Tsai: slow cinema and slow violence”

    Cultural Critique, Vol. 123, Spring 2024

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    Recent critical thinking on anthropogenic climate change has mourned cinema’s ability to capture the slow violence of large-scale environmental degradation and foresee a future of environmental disaster that is unchecked because it remains invisible to aesthetic representation. This essay argues that the rise of slow cinema aesthetics, particularly the affective mode of anxiety that it cultivates through the chronic violence of the long take, is one aesthetic approach within contemporary cinema to mediate slow violence. This argument is developed through a close reading of Tsai Ming-liang’s film, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006), paying particular attention to the representations of ambient toxicity, the exhausting forms of reproductive labor on display, and the queer forms of intimacy that are cultivated throughout.

  • “A Feminist Still: Documentary form and feminist protest” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, Media Studies

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    What can photographic form teach us about feminist historiography? Through close readings of photographs by visual artist and documentary photographer Sheba Chhachhi, who documented the struggle for women’s rights in India from the 1980s onward, this article outlines the political stakes of documentary photography’s formal conventions. First, it analyzes candid snapshots of recent protests for women’s rights in India, focusing on an iconic photograph by Chhachhi of Satyarani Chadha, a community organizer and women’s rights activist, at a rally in Delhi in 1980. It attends to the way in which such photographs turn personal scenes of mourning into collective memorials to militancy, even as they embalm their subjects in a state of temporal paralysis and strip them of their individual history. It contrasts these snapshots to Chhachhi’s collaborative portrait of Chadha from 1990, a “feminist still” that deploys formal conventions of stillness to stage temporal encounters between potential histories and unrealized futures. Throughout, the article returns to the untimeliness of Chhachhi’s photography, both in the multiple temporalities opened up within the image and in its avant-garde critique of feminist politics through experiments with photographic form.

  • “A Gasp of Air: Ecosexual intimacies in Tejal Shah’s Between The Waves” New Review of Film and Television Studies, special issue, “Breath: Image and Sound”

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    What does it mean to make love to trash? Experimental video artist, Tejal Shah’s work has consistently thought through the limits and capacities of the image to address queer sexuality. In their most recent work, Between the Waves the artist visualizes a lush feminist dystopia at the end of the world as we know it. Images of bodies – human, plant, and other life – are brought together in shifting relations of intimacy amidst landfill waste, forest swamps and deserted beaches. This paper develops a temporal critique of Shah’s installation, focusing on waiting as a queer dystopian form of cohabitation. While postcolonialism’s temporality has focused on the hauntings of the past in the present, in this writing, I take postcolonial interventions into linear temporality as informative for imagining queer postcolonial futures. Through the paper, I pay close attention to the acousmatic sounds of aspiration and nondiegetic breath, contending that such encounters render a postcolonial and posthuman ethics of queer care for selves and others in the midst of environmental ruin.

BOOK CHAPTERS

BOOK REVIEWS

  • “Queer Failures” omnibus review of Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora, Stephen Best, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life, and Alpesh Patel, Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories Art History. Vol 44: 4 (September 2021)

  • Grace Kyungwon Hong, Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference,
    Women and Performance, A Journal of Feminist Theory, Vol. 26 (1) Summer 2016.